Fortinet mops up defunct Ethernet start-up

UTM vendor Fortinet has cherry-picked the assets of high-speed Ethernet startup, Woven Systems, which disappeared in May after a funding shortfall.

By
John E Dunn
| Aug 20, 2009

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UTM vendor Fortinet has cherry-picked the assets of high-speed Ethernet start-up, Woven Systems, which disappeared in May after a funding shortfall.

The move is unusual for a company planning an IPO in the coming weeks, the exact prospectus for which has yet to be published, but it is likely that the core IP of Woven was on sale for a knock-down price that made it too juicy to resist.

The price of the deal has not been revealed, and it is also uncertain as to whether any of Woven's staff are involved.

With ex-Cisco staffers among its roster, Woven made a modest name for itself in high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching hardware, not at first glance Fortinet's market. But switching density and speed is increasing in security hardware such as Unified Threat management (UTM) appliances, and so in time Fortinet can use the IP to advance its own systems, such as the Fortigate 5000 series.

"Woven's ASIC-driven approach to high performance is highly complementary to Fortinet's own strategy for maximizing performance through customised processors," said Fortinet CEO, Ken Xie.

The official release mentioned that, "Fortinet intends to combine Woven's technology with its own custom network and content processors for increased scalability, which will bring about additional acceleration of security throughput for its FortiGate-5000 Series appliances."

The company said it would also continue selling some of Woven's current 10 GbE products, without specifying which models.